


The Merries: Marion’s Tale: Smoke

by SpoilersandHandcuffs



Series: The Merries [1]
Category: Robin of Sherwood
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 15:43:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16066238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpoilersandHandcuffs/pseuds/SpoilersandHandcuffs
Summary: The Merries Series is a series of vignettes centered around characters prior to their first encounters with Robin of Loxley.





	The Merries: Marion’s Tale: Smoke

The garden clung to the side of the castle like an unruly vine. Rows of tidy flowers, surrounded by tastefully gnarled trees, lay on the landscape hodgepodge as if the architect had begun a plan for taming the wildness and had suddenly found himself called away elsewhere...which is exactly what had taken place. 

The sunlight that managed to break between the clouds at odd intervals did little to life the gloom, while the mild winds of late April spoke of a warm summer.

 

A figure stood half in shadow, his face hidden from view as the light caught on the shining pink of a newly shaved tonsure which he carried like an egg atop a thatch of straight brown hair. He paused, stepping out into the garden, his sandaled toes brushing against the new grass. Walking with a shuffling gait more suited for the cloister, the man approached a tree near the garden's center and leaned wearily against the trunk.

Brother Tuck gasped, "I've been...all over the castle...should have known." A few mottled leaves and the small green shape of an unopened flower bud fell into his face, followed by a muffled sniffle.

"I wanted to be alone."

There was a movement above him, and then a bundle of elbows and knees and wiry red hair resolved itself into the form of a young girl as she dropped from the tree to the ground. She was trying without success to smooth the wrinkles out of the black linen of her dress, which was too large on her wiry frame. Like a frightened deer, she refused to meet his eyes as he caught a glimpse of her reddened lids and guessed at the cause.

Lady Marion of Leaford, heiress to her father's wealth and lands, was suddenly, in Tuck's eyes, no more and no less than a small, frightened little girl. A girl who, at the age of twelve, had just exchanged the only family and the only home she'd ever known for the cold, grey uncertainty of Nottingham. The ward of the Abbot Hugo and Robert de Renault, the Sheriff, was no different from the beggar children who camped out in front of the abbey door each day, he realized. They had the same hungry eyes and empty hands.

Without thinking, he hugged her to him briefly, then held her at arms length, looking directly into her startled face. "Tell me, Little Flower, have you seen the bees?,” he asked.

One big, cool palm lay on one thin shoulder, while he held two hats in the other hand. The hats were straw affairs, with long mesh nets hanging from them. Putting one on, Tuck grinned as he dropped one of them onto Marion, causing her to shriek as it covered her entire head and she and struggled to flip the mesh out of her way. That done, he led her to a nearby table where several small bee hives hummed with the activity of a burgeoning spring. She started, the oversized hat almost falling off her head.

"Won't they sting us?" she asked.

"No, my child, and even if they tried, they can't get through the hood." From the table, he picked up a small bellows.

"Do you know what this does?" he asked. The child's hood shook with a strong and solemn negative. "You fill it with smoke and blow the fog at the bees…” he said, showing her the motions, “ and then they fall into a sleep."

"And that's when you take the honey," she said, calmly. He looked at her, seeing the loneliness behind the tilt of her head, the dullness of her eyes beneath the hat's mesh. Pulling back the mesh from first his and then her hat, he stared into her eyes for a moment and then spoke.

"Sometimes...Sometimes we are like the bees. And God is like the bee-keeper. Problems come, like the smoke, and the Light inside us, well, it falls asleep."

Her voice was a sigh. "But when shall we wake?"

He stopped breathing and he saw her for a moment as she would be. Tuck felt the world breathe again. "When it's time, Little Flower. When it's time."  
He watched her,then,her form moulding into an echo of the muted vibration of the hive as she covered her face and bent to examine the patient, buzzing denizens, awaiting their moment to rise to golden glory.

 

"I've not been bewitched. I've been Awakened. You slept too long. We all have...It's time to fight back."

~ Robin of Loxley, The Hooded Man

**Author's Note:**

> Easter Eggs are present in each vignette..in this it is the connection between Marion,Tuck and beekeeping mentioned in the pilot episode. I felt it was a good metaphor for Marion’s grief, coming of age and a connection to female sexuality.


End file.
